For my feminist adventure, I watched a documentary on Netflix about Janis Joplin titled, “Janis: Little Girl Blue” which basically talked about how she became one of the most influential singers during the 60s. I chose this documentary because I’ve always heard about Janis Joplin and wanted to understand why she rose to fame so quickly and died so young (at age 27).

In the beginning of the documentary, her sister is interviewed and discusses how when Janis was younger, she was a bit of a rebel and had some issues regarding the way she looked. She was made fun of in school because she spoke out against segregation, and kids called her names because of it. At one point in her career she was singing in Austin, Texas and some fraternities at some school at voted her “ugliest man,” and one of her band mates mentioned during his interview that she really broke down after that (as one would imagine). I remember thinking during the documentary how sad it was that Janis had so many self-esteem issues but yet every time she was shown, she looked happy as can be and the most fun person in the room. And her talent marks her as one of the most influential female vocalists of the 20th century.

As I reflected on this documentary and what it had to do with feminism, I realized how many girls and women are affected by self-esteem and body/appearance issues. From an objective standpoint, one could argue that Janis is not the stereotypical “pretty girl.” But I think so many people (including myself) would say that Janis is beautiful because she’s Janis. That’s the message that I think feminism should include a bit more when discussing appearance issues because I don’t think it’s enough to say someone is beautiful just the way they are. While this is a good message and I do believe it, I think we should go a step further and really analyze what we’re seeing in people. We need to make the objective standard of beauty become the subjective standard of beauty, where we look at each person as if they were our own child and not in comparison with someone we saw in a magazine.

My question for my classmates is: Have you ever complimented someone on something that is not part of the objective standard of beauty or something we/society view as flaws (i.e. thick legs, crooked teeth, etc.)? I know for me personally, I compliment people on things they would want to hear (from an objective standard), and I’m curious how people would take these types of compliments on their “flaws.”

For this week’s class, we read and listened to pieces relating to how feminist activism can influence health and medicine. I wanted to focus on an NPR podcast (The Hidden Brain) titled, “Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” featuring Vanessa Gamble and Bettina Judd. The podcast discussed how during the 1800s, a physician named Dr. James Marion Sims, known as the father of modern gynecology, practiced unethical experimentation on enslaved black women. There are currently 3 statues of Dr. Sims in the United States, and the podcast discussed whether these statues are right to still be standing. Dr. Sims experimented on both black and white women, the difference being that he didn’t use anesthesia when experimenting on black women because there was a common belief that black people could handle more pain than white people. While Dr. Sims did eventually solve how to fix the vesicovaginal fistula that many women tear after giving birth, many women suffered from his experiments.

As soon as I knew what was going on within this podcast, I immediately thought of the Nuremburg trials against Nazi physicians who experimented on victims of the Holocaust while resulted in a code of ethics to be put in place against human experimentation. I also thought of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cells were taken without her permission because they multiplied at such a fast rate. Although within the medical field we’ve benefit from these unethical experiments, it leaves most people sick to their stomachs when they realize how we’ve gained this knowledge. From all three of these cases, with Dr. Sims, the Nazi experimentation, and Henrietta Lacks, we see that these people were experimented on because they were all treated like property and taken advantage of. In the podcast, Gamble mentions that black people are still not treated the same way as white people when they are in the hospital. I also think it’s fair to say that many people who present as poor, uneducated, and drug-addicted are not treated with the same respect in hospitals.

My mom, who is a licensed clinical social worker, works in hospitals often and constantly battles the healthcare system. She has found that when she hasn’t been at the hospital to advocate for my uncle who just had a heart attack that things have gone wrong or he hasn’t gotten the care he has needed. It’s a shame that people who are unconscious or not in their right state of mind in the hospital need professional advocates there to make sure that they get the right medication or are checking up on things that many healthcare professionals overlook or don’t have time to look into. Even family members who don’t understand the healthcare system are sometimes unable to advocate for the patient’s needs. It’s scary to think that the healthcare system, the people who are licensed to care for sick people, still needs revamping. My question based on this week’s podcast is, what other current issues in healthcare can we relate back to experimentation on enslaved black women by Dr. Sims?

This week, our class read a piece by Dr. Jennifer Almjeld, a Writing, Rhetorical, & Technical Communication professor at James Madison University, called “the f-word: a decade of hidden feminism in kairos“. Professor Almjeld and some of her students conducted research on various texts and videos from the journal, Kairos, through a feminist perspective. They found that many authors went in-depth with feminist topics, but didn’t explicitly state “feminism” within their texts. Almjeld and her class discussed that using the word “feminism” should be an empowering term, and they came up with 7 characteristics that describe what feminist rhetorics truly is. The terms were embodied, voiced, positioned, multi-modal, validating, challenging, and empowering. They conducted studies based on their definitions of each word and analyzed how well the texts followed their definitions of the words. The three most important findings they found throughout their research were the gender of the author (or lack thereof), author credentials, and whether or not the Kairos authors specifically defined themselves as feminists.

Today, Professor Almjeld came to speak to our class about the piece, and I found many of her insights fascinating. The main takeaway I gathered, though, was that even she struggles with when to drop the “f-word” or not. I think many of my classmates, including myself, found this comforting because although throughout the piece she advocated for the use of the word feminism, she knows that it can come across differently to different groups, especially if you’re telling the wrong audience about it. Feminism can be a broad term, but Professor Almjeld encouraged all of us to find out what feminism means to each of us specifically, because over time it will develop and we will finally feel confident to tell others our definitions as well. She also mentioned that if she were to include another characteristic for what defines feminist rhetorics, it would be “unpopular,” especially given the political climate we face today. Speaking about feminism can be an unpopular thing to do, both for those speaking about it and those listening to people speak about it.

After reading the piece and listening to Professor Almjeld’s insights today, I wanted to offer a question for our class moving forward: do you all think it’s important to take a deeper look into the authors we will be reading for our annotated bibliography in order to get a better sense of their “feminist lens”? And if so, what should be the standard?

Overall, I really enjoyed reading Professor Almjeld’s piece and listening to her speak today; she shared some great insight and was hilarious as well!

Last week, we read some of Sydne Rain Gray’s tweets from her perspective of the Women’s March. Sydney is a student who attends Oklahoma University and studies indigenous studies. She attended the march with a group she co-founded called Indigenous Women Rise. Throughout the march, she live tweeted from an indigenous woman’s perspective on the entire thing, and from reading the tweets and speaking to her over Skype as a class, we learned that it was an overall disappointing experience for her and her group. She found that the white women around her were disrespectful, and at one point, even walked throughout her group’s prayer circle. Many white women gave them weird looks while her group was chanting indigenous sayings. She and the folks she was with felt like they didn’t have a voice, given that they tried several times to hand out fliers on current issues facing indigenous people in the U.S. such as pipelines and fracking. Over Skype, Sydney discussed how she of course, doesn’t hate white people, but was commenting on how feminism has still not fully become intersectionalized. Many women of color are still forgotten in the feminist movement, and she continues to work towards the goal of having more indigenous women’s voices heard.

At first, when I read Sydney’s tweets, I was sad for her and her group, and also felt a bit like she hated white women. I tried understanding her perspective through her tweets, but it became difficult when I felt that she was bashing many white women at the march. However, when she spoke to our class over Skype, I finally understood what her purpose was by live-tweeting the event. She reassured us that she didn’t hate white people, but was more pointing out the disappointments she had with some of the women there who were blatantly disrespecting her group. I also finally understood the concept of intersectionality as many people’s reality. Indigenous people in the U.S. are barely recognized by our government, and most times they are forgotten even though they dealt with firsthand effects of colonialism. I’m really looking forward to learning more about intersectionality and feminism with regard to indigenous women in the U.S.

I’d be curious to know if indigenous men are supporting of the indigenous feminist movement. I would like to know more about the indigenous culture after listening to Sydney.

For this week’s blog, I chose an blog titled, “Food porn objectifies ‘women’s work’ instead of women’s bodies” written by Tisha Dejmanee. Throughout the blog, Dejmanee discusses how the new phenomenon known as “food porn” attempts to displace the objectivity of women’s bodies for women’s ability to make food. Food porn fulfills an animalistic desire of hunger while also invoking an underlying sexual desire. Dejmanee writes, “These blogs reflect the digital identities of women who have been required to embody multiple contradictions—and look delectable while doing so.” She argues that food porn allows for women to promote their feminism through the digital sphere while also showing off the more traditional role of women in the kitchen. In closing, she says that even though many people enjoy looking at food porn, “we should also take a moment to recognize the skills it takes to maintain such a presence online and the potential for feminist subversion behind these outwardly indulgent depictions of cooking and consumption.”

Before reading this blog, I thought that the author would be bashing food porn as a digital art and pin it as an anti-feminist use of the digital sphere. However, I found this blog to be quite the opposite. Dejmanee just wants readers to recognize all the hard work that goes behind making this food, even though it’s satisfying just to look at (much like real pornography). Weirdly enough, I have thought about the people behind food porn before reading this, but I also never thought of that the creators were only women. She does argue throughout her blog that both genders have been known to create food porn; however, she says that many of the creators are “mompreneurs” who are trying to create a digital brand. The author raised some good points throughout the blog for sure.

This blog expands our understanding of feminist rhetorics and digital activism because it shows how some women have used the digital space to combine both their feminine qualities and feminist qualities. Dejmanee drew the conclusion that these women are using food porn as a digital activism in order to combine their desire for entrepreneurship and their love of traditional, domestic work. Before reading this blog, I had never considered food porn to be any type of activism beyond getting people to take pleasure in the food they create and eat, but I can now see how it is feminist digital activism.

[*sidenote: I wanted to include a photo of food porn for imagery purposes, but didn’t want to tempt any of my readers!]

Before reading Andi Schwartz’s article, “Critical Blogging – Constructing Femmescapes Online,” I had no idea what a “femmescape” was. But after reading the article, I was reminded of the site known as Tumblr and how it plays a different role for every user, one of which happens to be a safe haven for people struggling with their gender identity.

When I first got my Tumblr account years ago, I used it to look at pictures from musicians and movies I liked, and usually re-posted things when I thought they were interesting or funny. But after further inspection of the site, I quickly realized that Tumblr allows people to feel like they can express themselves in a much different way than they can in real life, and in a way that I had no considered expressing myself online.

Schartz’s definition of femmescapes, which is “a network of public spaces through which queer identity is enacted, celebrated, and politicized,” pushed me to start thinking about what people who have been struggling with their gender identities did before Tumblr. If we understand Femme Tumblrs as what Schartz considers to be counterpublics, which is “a parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs,” then has it been applied before, and if so, how?

Back before the Internet, who were the femme bloggers? Because struggles with gender identity were a hushed topic and not to be broadcasted within towns or families, I wonder how these people “escaped” their societies back then. Did they write things down and pass notes? Hold quiet support groups? Ignore it all together?

Although we’ve come a long way and still have a long ways to go, I think it’s important to recognize how far we’ve come that these topics can be discussed freely online. I’m sure there have been and still are online bullies targeting these groups, but at least there’s a place to talk about these tough issues people are struggling with. It’s incredible that Schwartz can even pinpoint what a femmescape is and use scholarly sources to back up her claims. Because people are open to talking about their inner struggles online, it could help pave the way for more open, public discussions as well.